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How to make every modern animated movie ever
Alright, so the first decision that you need to make is what type of animation you're going to use - traditional hand-drawn, stop motion, etc. Which is easier because your movie is going to be 3D animated. After all, Treasure Planet failed massively and that was only over a decade ago and Tangled ''did better than ''Princess and the Frog, even though it was speculated that Tangled may have done a lot worse financially if it wasn't changed from the "girlier" name of Rapunzel. We can make our film about anything, but it's probably best if we base the designs of our characters off of the best toys that we can make. Cars, Emojis, anything that we can get some merchandise off of. After all, we're not making this movie to make money off of this movie. It's all about that merchandising film. The simpler the character with the least amount of shapes, the better. What's the basic premise of our film? Well, that's an easy one. I know some people say that "you can make your film about whatever you want" but we're not Pixar. Our film is going to be about "what does your x'' do when you're not watching." After all, the first CGI animated movie did that with toys, so it's marketed and guaranteed to work, even though Toy Story was nowhere near the first film to do something like that. It doesn't matter what exactly. It could be pets, emojis, computer files, because everyone wants to know what your toilet paper thinks when you're not around. Then again, maybe we could be a little bit creative. We could have a story about a princess who, despite being royalty, doesn't really want to be royalty and want something more with their life. After all, that's a plot that hasn't been done as much. The easiest way to do this is to make her feel or be physically restrained in one place. Either a palace or a tower or an island. Just a small location so we can make a metaphor that she's stuck in her own life. But if we're not going to do that, we either have two options: our main character is going to be at the top of society, or at the bottom. No in between. There are no other character types. Either they've got control and are set in their world view, but they're doing something fundamentally wrong. Or they're at the bottom of society. They're the outcast. Maybe they have some kind of defect that the rest of society doesn't like them. We're probably going to pick the latter because it's easier for the most people to relate to. Everyone has felt like an outcast at some point in their life, so we can make them relatable with the least amount of work. He, and unless we're making a princess, it's almost always going to be a he, is going to need a sidekick. The guy who is stated to be super loyal, and the main character's best friend, even though everything in the movie makes it seem like he's (and it's almost always a he as well) too stupid to live or has an active vendetta against his friend. Also, he should be the comic relief. It doesn't matter that our movie is a comedy and everything should be relatively comic, we need a character to break dramatic tension with comedy in our movie that doesn't have any real drama. He's going to be the biggest seller of toys. Actually fuck that. Not marketable enough. Let's just take the Minions. Find some easy to draw little round things. The great part of this is that they're really easy to draw (and make toys of), they all have the same/similar designs so we don't need to spend any extra effort in making extra designs. And of course, since they speak in gibberish, we don't have to waste any time on a script for them. We're going to make a fortune on this. Of course we need a girl main character because we don't want to be accused of being sexist. Just one girl hero though because any more of that would be a marketing risk. Yeah, we could still upset some people, so the easiest way to fix it is to just make her loud and obnoxious about being a girl. She doesn't need no help from no one, and is way past that stupid, outdated princess shit (even though she's secretly a princess, obviously). She could even be the main character, except that's too much of a marketing risk. We want our main character to be as relatable as possible, and as we all know it's so hard for a male audience to relate to a female character. We need a villain though. Something clever, but something that we shouldn't waste time on. After all, villains being the best part of an animated film is so passe. I know, we'll use the character type for the hero that we didn't use before. If the hero is the outcast, the villain is the one who is running the show. If the hero is the one running the show, the villain is the one screwing things up. Since we're going with the outcast, the guy at the top is going to be the villain here. But... this is the clever part: we're not gonna tell anyone that this is the villain until the very end of the movie. It's brilliant. It's a plot twist that no one will ever see coming, and if we keep at it, people will stop being pissed at us using the "it was all a dream" ending. This works out great. People are going to think that we're a genius, they'll have to see the movie twice to get all of the little clues, and it saves us time and effort actually developing the villain. It completely works if we just ''say this character was evil in the final ten minutes of the movie. After all, if you don't catch on, it just means that they're smart enough to hide their evil. The plot? That's easy enough. Our outcast has done what they've always done and screwed up too much. The villain who no one knows is a villain has had enough and forces them out of the society they've always known, either directly through exile or by just turning them into a wanted criminal. Generally, it doesn't matter. We'll figure it out in post anyway. The outcast has a heart of gold, and this proves it. They want to fix what they've screwed up and they must go past the home they've always known. it's said that there's only like seven plots in existence, so no one will notice if we only use one. Most of the plot is going to be going through set pieces. The characters exploring our whimsical and fantastic areas while the villain tries to kill them. This is going to be most of the movie, but we don't want it to seem like sight seeing. It's a good thing that we've got plenty we can work with. We'll have the girl fall in love with the outcast. There's absolutely no chance that this is going to backfire with how much she talks about how she doesn't need anyone. And you know that "character screws up too badly and must seek forgiveness." Well, since that's the only plot we can really afford, we can do that twice! We'll have the sidekick screw up and piss off the outcast, and it'll take up so much time when the two make up. It'll be so emotionally satisfying. After all, it's been in every other movie ever. It must be what people truly want. Unfortunately the run time might be running a little short, so we'll intersperse this with some shots of the hometown crumbling. It's not really important to the plot, but we need to reach an hour and a half, and we do need to remind the audience why they should care, because they simply don't have the attention span if we don't make this as blatant as possible. This all ends when the villain finally gets the outcast. This is the best time to reveal that the villain is the villain. And everyone is going to be shocked and appalled at what's going on. It doesn't really matter that this completely breaks any future the villain has and ruins any plans they could possibly have, because we know that they're going to lose. All movies have to end the same way, after all. However, the villain will end up killing someone. It's probably the side kick. After all, we've established that they're the side kick so it can be expected that the audience is emotionally invested in them. After all, the outcast went out of their way to forgive the sidekick nearly getting everyone killed; it would be selfish if the audience didn't. The sidekick dying is enough to convince the outcast to take a final stand and defeat the villain. We need to have a happy end though, so the side kick will come back to life. Maybe it'll be established earlier in the plot. It doesn't really matter. If the audience leaves in outrage at this point, the next set of customers are just going to think that the showing ended a little bit early. And we've got to leave room for a sequel. After all, it's much cheaper to just do this again than design another set of characters to find the exact same plot. The outcast will have changed their environment for the better, and it seems like everyone's happy now. Even though this is short lived as something will go wrong in four years when the sequel hits the market. And because we can't figure out a way to really end a story, let's just throw a random dance number in there. Take some pop song and have all of our characters celebrate that they did it. Roll credits, and cut me my check. -------- When you watch a lot of movies, you notice a lot of trends. A lot of people complain how "every animated movie is 3D now" but... I've noticed a lot more cliches. Keep in mind that this was largely satire. Many of these cliches appear in movies that I really do like, like Inside Out ''or ''The Lego Movie, but I do think that cliches are really killing the medium right now. It's sad because animation has the potential to be the most creative, wild, and fantastical media out there. But... don't like, you've seen a lot of movies that at least have... a few of these traits. If you're wondering, yes, The Emoji Movie did kind of inspire this as it's... the culmination of all of these traits (with the exception of the Minions ripoff). It's just a lot of shit I'm sick of. I'm sick of every movie being "what does your x'' do when you're out of the room?" I'm sick of the forced comic relief. (Seriously, it's in the name "relief." You don't need comic relief in a movie that's predominately already a comedy). I'm sick of movies ending with a dance party because no one knows how to fucking end a movie anymore. I'm ''tired of the twist ending villain. The "lol not really dead" pisses me off. And yeah, it's even going after companies that are on the top of the hill. I didn't really like Moana for instance because I don't think I saw one thing in that movie that hadn't been done in another Disney Princess film. At least Frozen had a new kind of environment. But we've already seen Polynesian environments in Lilo & Stitch; the open oceans in Atlantis, etc. It's a story of a princess who wants to get out of her confined area, wanting more, singing a feel-good song about wanting more. She comes across Maui, a demigod trying to find redemption... like Hercules. Yeah, I get that the Hollywood machine does this. They see something and they cannibalize it until it's sludge, but it doesn't mean I can't complain about it. Come on, animation can be about anything. I'm not expecting anything as unique as Fantasia, but there are other plot types than the hero's journey. There are other archetypes than the outcast, or the imperfect leader. Obviously not every single animated film nowadays has these traits, but admit it... if a film came out with this exact synopsis, you wouldn't find it out of place. Category:Miscellaneous